Liberia
The falls the falls People have been talking about Kpatawee since I got here. Eyes glaze over in a look of pure joy and heads shake in wonder. That show of enthusiasm is followed, most often, by a promise to organize a trip to take me. A promise broken more times than I care to […]
I’m on a porch in the cool evening. The last orange embers of the cooking coals smolder in the distance – light without illumination – their glow does not penetrate the black. The lightening has subsided. What had been an amazing show of God and nature, flashing streaks of white against purple in the curiously […]
The smell is what got to me. Despite the buffet of assaults to my sight and sensibility of norms and expectations, it is always the smell of antibiotics – thick as smoke –that permeates the hospital. In the past it has stopped me from venturing beyond the admin area, but today I had purpose that […]
We lost Stanley. After keeping the pantry door closed against our resident bat on and off for four months we had grown lax. We hadn’t seen Stanley and so assumed he’d moved on to more fruitful pastures. But a few days ago I stumbled to the bathroom in the wee hours of the morning and […]
The clouds were thick and gray, swollen cotton balls on a tile counter, drenched sheep in a blue pasture. The sky darkened and I looked up hopeful. We haven’t seen rain in months. No smattering of drops – nothing to replenish the dwindling wells. It wasn’t the first night the sky hinted. She’d teased before. […]
We almost didn’t stop. The dust, a cloud of cinnamon caught in a sneeze, billowed before us as we raced down the dirt road, gullies carved on either side in anticipation of future rains. We were racing time and honking as pedestrians wandered into what I imagine is usually a deserted strip of road. We […]
“you do not believe me but I swear to God.” He looked at me, the streetlight from across the well worn dirt road that separates my house from Mary Tiah’s casting shadows across his face. She and part of her family sat just out of earshot on their front porch. “when a Liberian man swears […]
Gutz is amazing. Seriously. The man provides, be it food, fun, or perspective. On Super Bowl Sunday halfway around the world…it was football. We gathered around his television set, four Americans, one enthusiastic and one reluctant Liberian. We gathered with fried chicken, plantains, and sweet potatoes, fresh pineapple, and ginger coconut cake. Gutz sweating over […]
Food is one of the great narratives of my life, and yet I am still surprised at how much the taste and lingering delight of a good meal can dictate the texture of my day and orchestrate the flavor of my mood. Food. More than sustenance and survival, for me it is tantamount to joy. […]
goat soup and Orion
I thought he’d forgotten. I languished beneath my mosquito net half reading a poorly written novel but mostly succumbing to the brutal heat still lingering in the late afternoon. My morning had been fruitful. My lift into town dropped me far away from the Catholic compound- barely in the city limits. On the side of […]
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